#Answereds

[pilferingapples]

(only answer this if you're in the mood for it of course) If you had to choose one colour and one single object for each of the five books in Les Miserables, which ones would you choose and (optionally) why?

oooh what a fun complicated question, I love this question! SHOCKINGLY I got long-winded about symbolism in the Long Winded Symbolism Book:

Tome 1: Fantine Color: Gold/ yellow gold for Fantine's hair, and also as a color strongly tied to wealth; no other volume is going to focus quite as much on finances as this chapter, from the Bishop and the wealth he rejects, to Valjean and his rising economic status, to Fantine and the commodification of her life to gain a few gold coins here and there. Object: a cart-wheel. I thought about the candle-sticks, and jet beads, and ships, and even teeth,but it's gotta be a cart-wheel. The wheels that carry the passengers and drivers of society but have no energy of their own; the wheels that crush anyone who falls underneath them, that take enormous force and energy and even demand the risking of life to move, break and splinter when needed to right injustice, and block all progress when stilled. The cart-wheels that stop when the horse dies, block off all hope of success at the Waterloo Inn, crush Fauchevelent and almost stop Valjean from saving his own soul. Frigging cart wheels.

Tome 2: Cosette Color: Black the color of a night in the dark forest, the inside of a grave or sunken road, Paris in the silence of a dark chase, a nun's habit. The color of despair, sure, the color of imprisonment, yes, but also the color of concealment, meditation, the unknown, peace. Object: I also considered: a water-bucket, a broken chain (for Cosette and Valjean both in this Book!), and Catherine the doll-- but it has to be a coffin. I'd say a tomb, but a coffin is more visually iconic and , of course, more immediately relevant to JVJ . LM is full of tomb and coffin imagery, but this is THE Tome of Tombs and coffins -- the impromptu tombs of the sunken road of Ohain, the chosen symbolic tomb of the convent itself (the nuns have to symbolically die and be reborn to fully enter!), the literal and ironically lifesaving coffin that Valjean is buried in. Tome 3: Marius MAN THIS ONE WAS SO HARD

Color: Green I REALLY AGONIZED ON THIS , it was Green or Blue though ; but the only real strong Blue imagery here is it being part of Marius' vision of Cosette

Green though! the color of growing things and spring and little seedlings just starting to grow, and flowers and Flora, and of Marius' secondhand coat , which looks black at night. New beginnings hidden in mourning , despite the losses of the past; flowers and growing things as signs of loss and loss as a beginning! It's what this Tome is all about, growth from grief and loss, and the grief and loss that comes from growth. Object: a piece of paper, folded into a letter. We won't get Marius' Epic Love Note until next Tome, but letters have enough of a starring role here as is! The letters Gillenormand burns to keep Marius apart from his father; the letter that doesn't burn that sends Marius to his father's deathbed; the note from his father that becomes his talisman (until lost); the letters that Thenardier sends to beg (and extort?) money, that connect Marius to Eponine and then Cosette again; letters as proof of status, proof that " we weren't meant to be like this--" ; letters as proof of identity, as love, as warnings, as traps. Letters as connection across time and generations and class and death. Tome IV: The Idyll and the Epic Color: Red Object: The Barricade look maybe both these options are stereotypical here but they are also correct. There's a whole song and years of Tumblr jokes about everything Red symbolizes and it's all in play here. It's desire and dawn and wine and warmth and death and revolution and warning and blood and fire and flowers and love. Especially love.

And the barricade is not just the single biggest Symbolic Object in the novel, it's especially the symbol of everything together, every loaded Symbolic Object in the whole book, wagon wheels and windows and doors and letters and stones and carts and yeah, probably coffins, the way this part of the novel is everyone's storylines coming together. A heap of joy and a heap of sorrows, all coming together to fight desperately for something better. Sometimes things are iconic for a reason.

Tome V: Jean Valjean Color: White White for dawn that's not the hour of waking; for Cosette's wedding gown; for a bottle of ink; for untouched marble and stone after the writing is washed away. Object : THE CANDLESTICKS I almost went with these for Tome I but no!! they belong here! in Valjean's Book! HIS symbols, that he finally gets to pass on , and oh geez if I get going on that I will NEVER post this, but you get it anyway right? you get it. It's gotta be the candlesticks, here at the end.

Thank you ! this was very fun to think about!!

[jesttoopoortoaffordbells]

Hi ...?

oh man i wish i could just respond to this with a picture of hairy man ass cuz thats how this makes me feel

i mean.. what else did you expect.

[thelunarsystemwrites]

jahsbsjajs I just saw you reblogged my spider pic I READ YOU ON AO3 I DIDNT KNOW YOU HAD TUMBLR anyway thanks for everything you've written its highkey helped me when life gets sketchy

No wayyy!!! :0 Yeah! >:D I rarely advertise my different platforms now, since my content is so different on each one (by that I mean fandoms.) But I'm glad I've been able to make things a bit easier! Keep pushing through life, because you're kicking @$$! /pos. /gen.

[willgrahamscock]

Hey are you offended by the word bitch? I'm going to send you a hate anon, but I saw that you go by she/her and I respect women

don't let anything stop u from being a hater king

[everythingwasnormalhere]

pls rb if you think cuddling doesn't have to be s3xual

im tryna prove a point to my bf's mother help me out

[unforth]

Y'all I know that when so-called AI generates ridiculous results it's hilarious and I find it as funny as the next guy but I NEED y'all to remember that every single time an AI answer is generated it uses 5x as much energy as a conventional websearch and burns through 10 ml of water. FOR EVERY ANSWER. Each big llm is equal to 300,000 kiligrams of carbon dioxide emissions.

LLMs are killing the environment, and when we generate answers for the lolz we're still contributing to it.

Stop using it. Stop using it for a.n.y.t.h.i.n.g. We need to kill it.

Sources:

[jackalspine]

@schnuffel-danny hehehe

regarding this post: from schnuffle

[ohnoitstbskyen]

What’s your thoughts on Delicious in Dungeons Character Designs?

Ryoko Kui is the best to ever do it.

[yourfavecharacterisqueer]

hypothetical scenario for you all: the real king arthur returns. you meet him and you welcome him into your home. what is the first thing you do with him? keep in mind, this is a man from the 500s (he died in 542), and you are from the 21st century (2024).

[phayz]

hold on hold on wait a minute

[theriverbeyond]

packing for a trip is like ok i need 30 pairs of underwear. my entire medicine cabinet. T shirt?

[pilferingapples]

Since you've read most of Victor Hugo's books, how would you rank them from best to worst, and why? I really want to know your thoughts. Always love to hear it <3

!!! THANK YOU THIS IS SO SWEET and also so hard but here we go!

Les Miserables yes it's my favorite but I also do think it's the best! The most ambitious of his works story-structure and character/theme density and frankly? He absolutely lands it. I have been arguing with and about this book for over a decade now and I expect I will be doing so for the rest of my life, because it's worth it. I probably don't have to argue hard for it in top spot on the Les Miserables Webbed Site, though, so moving on:

Ninety Three /Quatre-vingt treize Not my second favorite but honestly probably just as good as LM but in a different way? Much more compact and focused, and feels every bit of the influence of more recent political events in France at the time, but just as ambitious in terms of the arguments and themes it's trying to cover. The ending is something you can have eighty feelings about in an afternoon but it is always unforgettable. Deserves to be so much better known. Toilers of the Sea /Les Travailleurs de la mer  My actual second favorite Hugo novel! A big Romanticist nature-focused love letter to the Channel Islands and to the sea! A mix of delightfully unreliable Nature Facts and Hugo's own observations about the place, that Nature-focus is always convincing either way with Hugo's descriptions. It's so very different from most of Hugo's later novels, but also *so* good, if you're willing to just sit back and enjoy the view . Gilliatt is a Forever Fave. Please more people read Toilers, it's a delight. And it has an Octopus Fight! The Man Who Laughs /L'homme qui rit Victor Hugo's Revenge on English History! I could feel my knowledge of actual English History Facts peeling away as I read this. Incredibly described scenes, iconic central characters, Ursus is one of the best-written characters of all time (though I have learned that some people have apparently never met a guy like this?? he is such a Type though!) . There's a wolf and the wolf is named Homo. After Les Mis, some old Hugo fans were lamenting about how far he'd strayed since the days of Notre Dame , and I think The Man Who Laughs feels a lot like a return to that old , over-the-top Goth style of Hugo's,but stronger, in keeping with the way his writing had grown over time-- until the end, when everything kind of feels like it wraps up too abruptly. Which makes sense! Hugo was finishing it up while his wife Adéle was in her final illness, and it makes sense that it would show--but I think it does show, and keeps the novel from being quite all it could be. Notre Dame de Paris I know it's either Hugo's most famous or second-most famous novel, but I really do think it's not as solid as the others! Which isn't a roast on him, it's a good thing for an author to get better over time--but it still leaves this novel feeling kinda messy. I can see Hugo trying to do his signature move of pulling together multiple separate plot/themes into a triumphant grand finale, but he hasn't quite got the knack yet. Plus there's still a lot of elements here that feel like Hugo relying on tropes a bit (and horrible tropes at that, too) instead of entirely speaking with his own voice quite yet. (also ohman. the Issues. but I'm trying to keep this post from being nine million screens long) All of the above range from "absolute masterpiece" to "not an entire masterpiece but still iconic", and then there's Hugo's Early Stuff, so: Bug Jargal - honestly it's not fair of me to even include this, it was a novel he wrote as a very young person, on a time-dare. If I'd written a Nano novel in high school it would have been SO bad. And this is bad! It's SO bad!! But you can still definitely tell it's Hugo by the way he makes sure to tell us, AFTER the story is over, that EVERYONE IN THE WHOLE BOOK DIED, EVERYONE, EVEN THE PETS. Stunning. Peak Romanticism XD (again though. THE ISSUES. whooof.)

Han d'Islande: Í have not even read this one. HUGO was down on this one later in life. I Dare Not XD (I probably will someday). But it has a polar bear and drinking seawater from skulls and inspired some very questionable behavior from the fans (attempting to drink seawater from skulls!) so I gotta acknowledge it!

Honorable Mention: the novelas

Not quite in the same group as the novels, but I think both Last Day of a Condemned Man and Claude Geaux are excellent, super-focused stories about the injustice of the prison system and the issue of capital punishment. Obviously they can't have the range of his novels, but that's not the point--they are much more direct statements on a single issue and they're really intense and effective in that!

This was fun! thank you for asking! And I'd love to hear your own thoughts on this , if you ever feel like writing them up:D

[jesttoopoortoaffordbells]

How do you feel about soup bro?

😶i- 😳 ... ha well you see... i uh- 😣 i kinda like it.. i guess.. i mean yk.. if someone were to give me a bowl of it i guess id eat it 😖.. haha.. wh-why do you ask?? ar-are you gonna gibe mw a soip..? i 😖 i wouls like tagt.. haha.. ..please?

[willgrahamscock]

I noticed you haven’t been online in 10 hours, is therapy finally working?

this websites hate mail game is ruthless

[william-snekspeare]

conversation I have with my ferret 1000x a day

[nymphoutofwater]

And why? Cultural norms? Personal schedule? “Cause I’m always late to everything”?

Bonus points: Region and/or ethnicity?